SUFFA: Live on TikTok

SÜFFA: Press conference, image copyright Messe Stuttgart

There is a shortage of skilled workers in Germany. The reasons for this are complex and range from a growing number of young people without vocational training to demographic change and the dwindling attractiveness of many job profiles. Numerous butcher shops also lack trained staff and motivated trainees – the most important resources of any specialist shop. What to do? At the Stuttgart SÜFFA, trade fair for the meat industry, this question will be discussed from various perspectives (October 21 to 23).

"The situation for young people is now extremely difficult," says Barbara Zinkl-Funk, managing partner of the first Bavarian butcher's school founded in Landshut in 1928. “There are far too few trainees, both in the butchers and in sales. At the moment there is still a hard-working, resilient generation that has learned their craft from scratch and is proud of it. But if there is so little at the grassroots level, the industry will face a problem in the medium term.”

Automation or foreign skilled workers
One approach to avoiding staff shortages is a higher degree of rationalization and automation - for example through a larger range of canned goods or a self-service counter. However, it is not possible to restructure arbitrarily everywhere, warns Zinkl-Funk: "It depends on how the respective company is organized. Especially in the small-structure area, a lot is still done by hand. Flexibility and a wide range of skills are required there, in other words: classic craftsmen and all-rounders, not machines.”

In the search for staff, the gaze sometimes wanders to faraway countries. In a pilot project in cooperation with the Freiburg Chamber of Crafts, which is unique in Germany, master butcher Joachim Lederer, head of the butcher trade guild in Baden-Württemberg, was able to convince young people from India to complete an apprenticeship in the meat industry in Germany. This step was "long overdue" for him, says Lederer, who has even presented the project several times on television and praises the high motivation of the new trainees.

Smartphones, social media & co.
Motivation is also a keyword for Barbara Zinkl-Funk. She sees an opportunity in the skilled labor crisis: “The quality of junior staff is increasing. We find that those who choose a butcher's job do so consciously and not just as an emergency solution, as was sometimes the case in the past. The young people are specifically looking for good training companies. About two-thirds of our master class participants want to start their own business or take it over later.” In order to get potential young people interested in the trade and to attract motivated staff, a simple newspaper advertisement is no longer enough: “You have to think carefully about who you want to address and which channels you can use. A new trend is to use media-savvy trainees as ambassadors, who then report live from the sausage kitchen on TikTok, for example.”

Eyüp Aramaz, managing director of the Germany-wide marketing and recruiting agency Aramaz Digital and lecturer in social media, personnel marketing and employer branding at the FHM Bielefeld, is pursuing a “holistic” strategy. “Due to demographic change, digitization and, in particular, social media, the conditions on the labor market are very different today than they were just a few decades ago. If you want to find good employees, omnipresence is the be-all and end-all.” This applies above all to the smartphone, which has long outstripped traditional media in terms of usage time.

Appreciate the offspring
In all of this, it is important to work out and communicate the advantages of one's own business, explains Aramaz, who has already successfully looked after over 200 food businesses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A trade fair like SÜFFA can therefore “achieve a lot as a platform” to counteract the shortage of skilled workers. Barbara Zinkl-Funk thinks so too: Since the SÜFFA is traditionally attended by many vocational schools, it is "a great tool to motivate the journeymen to stay in their job and to show them the wide range of opportunities they have at home. and abroad are open. But the most important thing is to show appreciation for the youngsters. More is expected of trainees today, but the trainees also have high expectations of their training company – and rightly so!”

https://www.fleischerschule-landshut.de/

https://www.aramaz-digital.de/

About SÜFFA
People and markets come together at the SÜFFA in Stuttgart. It is the meeting place for the butcher trade and medium-sized industry. In the halls, exhibiting companies from the fields of production, sales and shop fittings present themselves to the competent specialist audience. The SÜFFA specials also make the trade fair an event that no specialist company should miss.

https://www.messe-stuttgart.de/sueffa/

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